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What happened to America’s Can-Do Spirit?

I’m referring to the spirit that John Wayne personified when he played a character based on the life of Red Adair (the legendary oil well firefighter) in the 1948 film Hellfighters? Throughout our history Americans have always considered this nation exceptional, there is no problem we can’t solve, no goal we can’t achieve.

That’s why it was so troubling to see the leader of the free world bowing to the Saudi King and to the Japanese Emperor. It just didn’t sit well with most Americans. And neither did his comment that: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exception­alism.” In other words we are no different than any other country. It seems that President Obama and the progressives in this country have a different view of America. They think we should tone down our exceptionalism and behave more like citizens of the world.

It’s almost as if we are living in two different Americas.

The America that progressives live in is a different place than where we live. It’s a depressing existence in a nation of diminishing resources, where producers of oil, coal and natural gas are demonized, where health care is rationed, where the climate is something to be feared, where people with too many offspring are destroying Gaia. A nation where capitalism creates an unconscionable gap between the rich and the poor. It’s not a place where you and I want to live.

And we don’t have to because the America they live in is not real, it’s fake, let me explain point by point why the left is wrong on every issue:

Anthropogenic Global Warming

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and driving a SUV to your grandma’s house for the weekend will not destroy the planet. NASA’s Argo system of ocean going buoys measured the temperature of the oceans for 5 years and found no warming. In fact during that time the earth cooled slightly, as reported by NPR in 2008: (my emphasis)

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.”

Is overpopulation destroying the planet?

Many on the left think we are having too many children, you see, people are bad for the planet. This article in the Sunday Times from Feb. ’09 gives us a glimpse into the warped mind of Jonathon Porritt, a “green adviser” to the government in the UK:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population. [...]

Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

Well, that’s certainly one way to reduce the population of the earth; more illness and more abortions. To say his comments are disturbing is an understatement but this is the way the radical left thinks. One has to wonder at what point in the future these abortions will become mandatory?

But then, abortions don’t have to be mandatory, do they? Many of the countries where these radical environmentalists live are already in a demographic death spiral. The native populations in the UK, Japan and parts of Europe are not having enough children to maintain their current numbers. Porritt and his colleagues have apparently already succeeded in the western world.

I wonder how receptive people in the Middle East or Africa would be to their ideas? As Mark Steyn reminds us: “Between now and mid-century, Islam and sub-Saharan Africa will be responsible for almost all the world’s population growth…”

Here is an idea that may be too logical and simple for a progressive to understand; instead of abortions to save the planet and wasting billions to reduce the temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree why don’t we spend some of that money to feed the 16,000 children who die of starvation every year.

Rationing of Health-care

Will Obamacare bring rationed health care to America? Let’s ask Donald Berwick who was selected by Obama to run Medicare and Medicade and is a fan of the National Health Service in the UK. Here are his own words on the subject: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision will be whether we ration care with our eyes open.” So, yes Obamacare is rationed health care. This report from the Telegraph shows how it works in the UK:

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered more than 80 cases in which desperately sick NHS patients have been refused the cancer drugs their doctor sought, in the four months since a £200 million fund was introduced to stop health authorities rationing treatments.

The fund was a key move by the Coalition so that those suffering from cancer would never again be refused drugs on grounds of cost.

Ministers were responding to years of anger over a system which meant patients were unable to secure life-extending drugs because central NHS rationers had decided the treatments were not “cost effective”.

Announcing the fund last summer, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, promised to end “the scandal” of cancer patients being refused the drugs that their doctors sought, because of restrictions by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

What about poor people?

The rich and the poor have been with us since the beginning of recorded history and until someone invents a replicator like the one on Star Trek the poor will always be among us. If you want to find poor people today look no further than your friendly neighborhood socialist dictatorship. And while capitalism is not perfect, the free market system has done more to lift millions out of poverty than any other system ever devised by man.

The Evils of Big Oil

The left demonizes big oil in part because of the threat of global warming and yet as I noted above NASA tells us that the oceans actually cooled slightly from 2003 to 2008. So, it doesn’t look like the planet is going to turn into a ball of fire anytime soon. With all the record setting cold temperatures we’ve had recently maybe we should be more worried about a little ice age which would be many times more deadly than a slight warming.

But we are running out of oil, aren’t we? Experts have been debating when the world will run out of oil since M. King Hubbert came up with the “peak theory” in 1956. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 just as Hubbert predicted. It’s interesting to note that U.S. oil production peaked just one year after the Santa Barbara oil spill. California has not granted any new leases for offshore drilling within its jurisdiction since then.

Some experts say the world has already reached peak oil, others say the world won’t reach peak oil until 2020 or later. But with the flurry of drilling activity going on outside of U.S. territory who knows how much oil is out there? New discoveries are being made all the time. The word from other countries around the world is “drill baby drill”. This recent article from Bloomberg is an example of how the rest of the world is moving on without us:

Geologist Bets on $70 Billion Oil Find Chasing Atlantic Drift

Angus McCoss, exploration director and chief geologist at Tullow Oil Plc, which in 2007 discovered one of the biggest oil finds of recent years off the coast of West Africa, is betting more than $100 million that a similar bonanza awaits off South America’s eastern shore, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Feb. 28 issue.

Tullow and partners Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA by the end of March will start drilling their first deepwater test well about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off French Guiana, a sliver of South American rainforest best known as a former penal colony. The prospect field, called Zaedyus, lies 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) below the ocean’s surface.

McCoss, who spent most of his career at Shell, aims to repeat the success of Jubilee, Tullow’s 120,000 barrel-a-day field off Ghana on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. He’s optimistic because of evidence that Zaedyus mirrors Jubilee’s geology, formed in the Cretaceous period when the African and South American land masses began to separate.

Imagine that, they are drilling in 21,000 ft of water off the coast of off French Guiana 100 miles from a South American rainforest. Here in America we’ve had only one permit issued for deepwater drilling since the Obama administration moratorium.

We should be searching for oil everywhere in America right now; in the Gulf, off the Atlantic coast, off the coast of California and in ANWR. Of course we all know the reason why we aren’t. Obama has placed like-minded liberal elites and greenies throughout his administration. America’s natural resources will remain under lock and key until a Republican President occupies the Oval Office.

Liberal policies are like kryptonite to America’s can-do spirit. Europeans may enjoy living in a cradle to grave nanny state but for a nation as exceptional as ours liberalism is just plain wrong and unworkable.